I'd love to tell you that this story began with X's and O's backstage after some brilliant festival run of the Donizetti queens, where three devastatingly virtuosic sopranos got together and came up with the idea for a no-hold-barred opera weblog. But here's how it really happened.

    I was enjoying a stiff drink late on a Wednesday evening at home, when I got the intercom buzz from downstairs. I don't normally get visitors, so I was understandably disturbed when through the speaker I heard "Aprite la porta! We're tired and hungry and pissed off. We saw your light on. Now let us in!"
    "Um, who are you?"
    "We're the Assolutas, you prick! We're about to put the muthafuckin' TINA back in Christina Gallardo-Domas. "
    "Look, I agree; she sucks. But bitches, please! Methamphetamines are for gay people."
    "Opera is so messed up today, and no one seems to care. When someone speaks up about the lack of excellence in singing, they get treated like a guest at the Holocaust Hotel," one of them replied. "The three of us met at an audition for the next substitute member of the unstable… er… ever-changing 90's R&B girl group En Vogue. We were so fed up with our colleagues' singing and with the atrocious sounds on the Met Broadcasts that we decided to make a go of the crossover career. It seemed to work for everyone else… didn't it? But then we got to thinking, once we got famous for being opera singers turned urban music idols, there'd probably be a mad rush of shitty sopranos and tenors flocking to Timb's studio to get they piece. So we decided to take a torch to every major opera house in America. We figured someone would get the message. It's gonna be like the Jedi Purge of the Old Republic! They'll all either die or go into hiding!"
    "Wait, wait, wait! Maybe there's another way to go about this, though. Instead of washing your hands of the opera world, why not do the crossover that every news agency and pundit in America is doing?"
    "What's that?"
    "Ghorl! Ain'tchoo never heard of the Internets? We're gonna get y'all a web log! I mean… a weblog! It'll give you a chance to be catty and 'academic,' and hopefully you'll be occupied enough not to notice your withdrawl from crystal."
    "We're into it."

    I let them in, they came up the stairs, they knocked on the door, I opened. Except one thing. There wasn't three of them; there was one. It was a fright: this haggard, skeletal, convulsive woman in front of me with her skirts hiked around her waist and her feet skittering about, doing the pee-pee dance. "I thought you said there were three of you!" I exclaimed.
    "Oh, there are, darling. We're aaallll in here," she said, tapping on her head. She offered an ear-splitting "Hojotoho" (each a major third apart), I was sold. I let her proceed with her toilette and fixed her a cauldron of hot soup. I showed her a few websites of interest and how to encode mp3's. Meanwhile, I fiddled with MovableType, futzed with the voice of contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink, and fenagled a little valid CSS to create Trrill.com: Florid Passages from Queer Opera Zealots.

    Now, with their hands on the mouse, their ears on any recording they can find, and their pince nez stuffed neatly into their corsets, the Assolutas sit in their palco funesto, ready to spit fire on the unsuspecting opera world.

+ Read more here.